It Was Never About Taking Jobs: AI and the Real Threat to Digital Marketing

The other night down the pub, a mate told me he built a personal CV website in four hours using GPT. No template. No coding. No need for Squarespace, Webflow, or any traditional website builder. Just a few prompts, a bit of tweaking, and a live link ready to send to recruiters. “It’s not great,” he said. “But it’s good enough.”

That’s what stuck with me. Not the speed, or the cleverness, or the fact he’d pulled it off without touching a CMS. It was that a year ago, he would’ve used a website builder. Maybe even paid someone to help. But now, that whole step—the platforms, the tutorials, the templates, even the idea of searching for help—just… didn’t feature.

And it got me thinking. The conversation around AI has been dominated by whether it will “take jobs.” But that has never been the main threat. The real shift is subtler—and harder to respond to. AI isn’t just replacing people. It’s changing what people do. And that’s what makes some jobs, tools, and services feel unnecessary, sometimes overnight.

It’s not just websites.

We’re seeing this same pattern in everything from content creation to product research to hiring. Whole layers of the process are being skipped. People no longer start with “What platform should I use?” or “Who can help me with this?”—they start with “Can I get this done myself, right now?” And increasingly, the answer is yes.

That doesn’t just reduce demand for help. It reduces the number of steps where help is even considered.

Think about how many businesses exist to support those steps: Helping people compare options. Helping them write or design something. Helping them understand a topic. Helping them build, launch, or improve.

When the step disappears, the support structure starts to look unnecessary—not because it lacks value, but because the user never gets far enough to ask for it.

This shift is already playing out.

Traffic to educational content is softening in some sectors—not because interest has dropped, but because people are getting direct answers elsewhere. Lightweight copywriting work is becoming harder to sell, not because the ideas aren't needed, but because a decent first draft now comes free with a prompt. Even things like product discovery or competitor research are changing shape—people are using AI to get quick comparisons instead of trawling through websites, reviews, or long articles.

In creative and marketing roles, we’re also seeing more briefs arrive half-formed—clients who've already asked AI what to do, and now just want someone to validate or execute it. That has implications for the type of work people want, and what they're willing to invest in. They’re still spending—just in different places, and with different expectations.

And this goes far beyond agencies. It affects platforms, marketplaces, subscription tools, SaaS businesses—anyone who built their proposition around saving people time, simplifying complexity, or helping them get started.

Because if someone no longer experiences the friction you were designed to solve, it’s not that they don’t need you. It’s that they never think to look.

None of this means businesses are being replaced. What’s being replaced is the moment of relevance.

If your value came from being the shortcut, or the helper, or the explainer, you may find that the route people take now just doesn’t pass through where you used to stand.

The question isn’t "will AI do our job better?"

It’s "what happens when people stop doing the things our job was built around?"

That’s the real shift. Not loss of skill, but loss of fit.

And that’s what we all need to adapt to. Quietly. Quickly. Before "good enough" becomes the new standard.